The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.
DOROTHEA LANGETo know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
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It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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… it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.
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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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This benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
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Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
DOROTHEA LANGE